Mahaska County CERT Team Practices Triage

Tyler Schneider plays the 'victim' in a mock mass causality event on the square in downtown Oskaloosa Monday night

Oskaloosa, Iowa – The Mahaska County CERT Team is much like any other community group that has a board and membership structure. One of the differences is in the way they serve the community.

CERT prepares to serve the community in a time of disaster. Meanwhile, CERT helps it’s community, along the way, by giving of their time to help staff and serve events like Special Olympics.

Monday night the group had their regular meeting at Smokey Row, but then they headed across the street to Central Park so they could continue their training to serve the community.

Mahaska County Emergency Manager Jamey Robinson said Monday night was “Ongoing training. We decided we needed to continue our training to keep the CERT Team [active] so they know what’s going on and that they are able to perform these skills in the event something were to happen. Tonight we picked triage, a very important task and it’s unfortunate that we’d ever have to utilize this skill, but if we do need to use it we know they’re trained to do it.”

Jim Walker, CERT Team Captain explained briefly the amount of training a CERT member would have. “We have about 20 hours of training in the book, that covers everything from CPR, First Aid, how to work as a team.”

Robinson explained to the group, earlier in the evening, that one of the hardest things about triage is saying, “There’s nothing else I can do” when a victim is marked as black. Part of the triage training is being able to identify the condition of victims, and make painful decisions in the field.